Re: Byte Order (was: Byte Addressability And Beyond)

Please do me a favor and DO NOT guess why they did it --

Concerning the speculations about the PDP-11, here's one: Was it
designed for also supporting an implementation with a 4-bit or 8-bit
basis?

There are a bunch of design notes at bitsavers and none of them say
anything about it. There was one place that might have hinted that
little endian would save a few flip flops but since every PDP-11 was
16 bits internally, it wouldn't have saved much.

The PDP-X (the DEC-internal project that was canceled in favor of the
PDP-11 and eventually became the Nova) might have influenced the
PDP-11 in that way.

I gather the PDP-X and PDP-11 were warring camps.  There's a bunch
of PDP-X notes at bitsavers and I don't see anything related to
the -11.  In the Bell et al book there's a lot about the -11 which
only says it's different from the -8 and -9 series.
--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly